multitouch
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DAHAN T&S' 120-inch multi-touch panel
In case you missed it, everyone, and we mean everyone is talking multi-touch these days. Few however, can muster a multi-touch panel in sizes of 100-inches and beyond. The panel above is a 120-inch, rear-projection jobbie from DAHAN T&S offering a 10ms repsonse. Sure, it's running XP at the moment, but with some of the wildest speculation citing a new multi-touch interface as the reason for Leopard's delay, who knows what that panel might be sporting come October.
Apple's next big move: Multitouch displays?
Speaking of multitouch, Steven Johnson, the guy who wrote Everything Bad is Good For You and Emergence, isn't normally our go-to guy for Apple rumors, but he has an interesting theory about what the company's next big move might be. He speculates that all these hints about new, unannounced features for Leopard, combined with a delay in the release of new Apple Cinema Displays, the coming launch of the iPhone, and rumors about a new "ProTools killer" that relies on touch screens, all point toward the introduction of new multitouch-capable displays and the rollout of iPhone-like multitouch interfaces across Apple's product line. Yeah, that'd be crazy, right? Jobs definitely loves having symmetry in his product lines, so even though this seems pretty unlikely it's not totally impossible that he'd want to bring multitouch to stuff besides the iPhone. That said, we haven't heard a single thing about new Apple displays sporting multitouch capabilities, so for now we'll file this one under "wild speculation."
Build your own multi-touch table
NYU may have been the first to put the mouthful that is frustrated total internal reflection (FTIR) to use in a multi-touch display, but it's not the only one experimenting with the curiously-named technology, with the folks at tinker.it building a setup of their own and explaining how they did it. As the video after the break shows, the end result is slightly less polished than NYU's device, but it puts on an impressive light show nonetheless, tracking your fingers' movement in a suitably hypnotic fashion. While tinker.it's guide doesn't exactly hold your hand though the process, those with the necessary skills should be able to build their own rig relatively easily, with some coffee table excess seemingly only a few more steps away for those with the carpentry skills to match.[Via MAKE:Blog]
